Maryland’s Smith School Launches A 1-Year MBA, Joining A Growing Wave Of Accelerated Programs

The University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business will begin offering a one-year, full-time MBA in the summer of 2027. It’s the latest business school to embrace a shorter, AI-focused format as more programs rethink the traditional two-year model.

The executive overseeing the redesign tells Poets&Quants that Smith isn’t worried the new track will eat into its flagship two-year program – and lays out how the school is dividing applicants, tuition, and career support between the two tracks.

“We are not concerned that the one-year MBA will cannibalize from our traditional two-year program, as the structure will appeal to different populations and provide different experiences,” says Rosellina Ferraro, Smith’s associate dean of master’s programs. One-year students, she adds, are trading breadth for speed – “a faster return on their investment.” Two-year students get more time to explore, which she calls “especially beneficial for career pivoters and those looking to transition into a new industry.”

Ferraro expects the two tracks to produce graduates whose careers eventually converge rather than compete: “We expect their career trajectories to become more parallel and potentially overlap five to ten years down the line.”

AN AI-FOCUSED CURRICULUM, BUILT FOR WIDER ACCESS

The new option is anchored in what Smith calls a “leadership for a rewired world” theme. AI fluency is built into every course, and the program centers on Execution Labs, a series of experiential classes built around corporate partnerships.

“It is a full MBA redesigned for the AI era, not a compressed version of the two-year model,” Ferraro says.

Unlike many peer one-year programs, she notes, Maryland’s version won’t require an undergraduate business degree, a specialty master’s background, or transferable credits – a deliberate choice meant to widen access for candidates with varied academic and professional backgrounds.

Smith Dean Prabhudev Konana says the new one-year MBA is a response to a job market reshaped by artificial intelligence, geopolitical realignment, and economic disruption. “This one-year MBA is built for that reality,” he says in a news release. “We designed a program that accelerates career growth while giving students the AI fluency, analytical discipline, and executional experience required to lead in complex, high-stakes environments.”

WHO SMITH IS RECRUITING FOR EACH TRACK

Ferraro says the two programs are being built for different applicants, not competing marketing pitches for the same one.

One-year candidates should arrive with “clearly defined career goals and a strong understanding of how the MBA will help them reach the next level,” she says. The accelerated pace suits professionals focused on advancing within a field where they already have experience or strong transferable skills, rather than switching industries or functions.

The two-year track, by contrast, is built for the bigger pivot.

“The two-year student will more likely be someone who would like to pivot both their industry and functional roles,” Ferraro says, “thus leveraging the ability to do a summer internship during the two-year program.”

SAME TUITION, COMPRESSED TIMELINE

Both programs will cost the same on paper, Ferraro says. “The tuition costs are based on a 48-credit requirement for the MBA regardless of the format.”

That 48-credit figure isn’t new to the one-year track – it’s the same reduction Smith announced in late July for all of its MBA programs, down from 54 credits, starting with the Fall 2026 cohort. At the school’s current Full-Time MBA rate of $1,759.50 per credit, the cut brings total tuition to roughly $84,432, down from $94,986 – a savings of about $10,500, before fees and living expenses. Taken together with the new one-year track, it points to a broader push at Smith to streamline its MBA portfolio – trimming cost and time-to-degree across the board, not just for students choosing the accelerated format.

The difference between formats, then, is pace, not price: one-year students start earlier in the year and carry a heavier credit load each semester to compress the same 48 credits into 12 months, while two-year students spread that same course load out.

REPLACING THE INTERNSHIP

Without a summer internship – the recruiting anchor for most two-year MBA students – Smith is leaning on earlier and more intensive career support for the one-year cohort.

“Career support starts months before they arrive on campus,” Ferraro says, with coaching, networking, employer engagement, and recruiting preparation built in ahead of the program itself.

She’s candid about the format’s limits, though. For students looking to make a major career or industry pivot, “the two-year MBA would be a better fit because it offers more time and the benefit of a summer internship.”

CORPORATE PARTNERS BEHIND THE EXECUTION LABS

The Execution Labs won’t be built from scratch. Ferraro says Smith’s Office of Experiential Learning works closely with its Office of Career Services on this front.

The two offices already draw on “an existing portfolio of 250+ alumni, government and corporate partners that provide unique experiential learning projects across both graduate and undergraduate programs,” she says, with organizations added to that roster in real time.

That existing depth and breadth of relationships, Ferraro says, will drive the lab projects – with the goal, in both the one-year and two-year formats, of having students “produce professional-grade outputs.”

Prospective applicants can schedule a virtual consultation or apply through the university’s graduate application portal.

A CROWDED – AND SHIFTING – FIELD

Smith’s announcement lands amid a period of unusual churn in one-year MBA offerings. Business schools are weighing the same trade-off Maryland is navigating: how to serve applicants who increasingly balk at two years away from the workforce, without diluting the brand equity of their flagship programs.

The one-year format itself isn’t new. Northwestern Kellogg pioneered it in 1965, and they and Cornell Johnson, USC Marshall, and Emory’s Goizueta Business School have run established one-year tracks for years, typically aimed at applicants who already hold business or technical undergraduate training and can skip core coursework.

What has changed is the number of schools now treating the format as a strategic centerpiece rather than a niche option.

The University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management made the most sweeping version of that bet, eliminating its traditional two-year MBA entirely in favor of a one-year program beginning in 2025 and cutting what had been a 21-month program roughly in half. Eller dean Karthik Kannan has described the move as a financial necessity as much as a market response, telling P&Q that a room full of fellow business school deans had no answer when he asked how many of their full-time MBA programs were profitable. Kannan portrays the shift as increasingly unavoidable outside the very top tier, with the real strategic question being timing – “whether you wait for the market to force the change – or move first.”

The University of Arkansas’s Sam M. Walton College of Business made a similar move last year, redesigning its full-time MBA from a 21-month format into a one-year curriculum starting in 2025. Walton MBA leadership cited the same opportunity-cost pressure driving Maryland’s redesign – professionals who want the credential without a lengthy break from their careers.

2 PATHS: ADD A TRACK, OR CUT ONE LOOSE

Other schools have taken the more incremental path Smith is following: adding a one-year option while keeping a two-year MBA intact. The University of Connecticut, which shuttered its traditional two-year, full-time MBA back in 2021 in favor of online and part-time Flex formats, this year launched a new stand-alone one-year MBA as a fast-track addition to that redesigned portfolio.

Several other schools have gone further, exiting the full-time MBA market altogether rather than shortening it. Penn State’s Smeal College of Business cut its MBA from two years to one and designated it a STEM degree in 2022, after enrollment fell by nearly half over the prior two years.

Not all schools have slimmed down by going to one year from two – some have simply redirected resources after dropping the full-time MBA altogether. The University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business phased out its full-time MBA after 2019, moving resources into its part-time and specialized master’s programs. The University of Illinois’s Gies College of Business eliminated both its full- and part-time MBA programs that same year in favor of its online MBA – a wildly successful move, as it happens. Wake Forest exited the full-time MBA market in 2014, and Virginia Tech and Simmons College have also shut down their full-time, on-campus programs in recent years.

Smith, for its part, isn’t signaling any retreat from its two-year MBA. The new program is being marketed as a second door into the school rather than a replacement for the first.

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